CONTINUING EDUCATION AS A TOOL FOR MIS SIONAL RENEWAL
A Speech for the Western Mssion Cluster Consultation
on the Delivery of Continuing Education
Spirit of the Desert Retreat Center
Carefree, Arizona
5 December 1998
by
President Timothy F. Lull
Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary, Berkeley, CA
Prologue: We can now begin to look back on the Study of Theological Education and ask in a fresh way, "What does Clustering mean?" I would argue that there were two original visions—a "soft" sense of clustering that wanted the seminaries to work cooperatively beyond what they had done in the past and a "hard" concept that wanted to use clustering to press economies on the seminaries including a solution of the long question about their number and location. Since this seemed unable to be settled nationally, it was hoped that it would be worked out by each cluster.
On the horizon all along, and much more important subsequently, was a third notion of clustering centering on increased access to theological education. While driven by the demand to offer MDiv. study in more locations as preparation for ordination, the more visionary side of the "access argument" saw a renewed and enriched system of theological education at every level, including high-quality lay education, continuing education for rostered leaders, and courses for credit on the way to degrees and certification.
It is this third concept of clustering which has driven the Western Mission Cluster to date and which is the occasion for this consultation which hopes to expand and solidity newly emerging partnerships. But the need for renewed access at every level is not seen in its strategic importance until one understands the current shift of the church's situation toward the centrality of the question of local mission. This paper tries to explain why the success of our enterprise is so crucial for the missional future of our church.
1. The church's central task today is the renewal of mission at the congregational level.
The end of Christendom, the situation of religious pluralism, and the great number of formerly church in America create a situation in which renewed local mission is both necessary if the church is to have a future, and yet far more challenging than the religious revival of the post-World War 11 period.
It is hard for congregations to adjust to this new reality, especially where the number of already gathered members is still large enough to allow the energy to flow into programming to meet their various needs. But on the coasts, especially on the West Coast, and in urban situations generally, the new reality in which our churches have to scramble for members is well known. In fact in the Coastal West there is already a considerable history of not knowing how to cope with this new reality, a couple of decades in which it has been very frustrating to find the formula for Lutherans open to mission.
There are also local pockets where Christendom continues almost intact or where migrations from one region to another foster a somewhat traditional Lutheran approach to evangelism. But increasingly the question of whether our many of our churches will survive long into the new century is known in all regions, in urban and rural contexts, and even in places where Lutherans have considerably had considerable ecclesial strength.
2. Moving Lutheran congregations to a mission orientation is a formidable task.
While many have been passively welcoming those who come to inquire, few have centered their lives on witnessing to the gospel in a public way in their local communities. There are problems both in Lutheran theology and the Lutheran ethos that make it very difficult for congregations to make this transition, but the deep source of resistance is the fear of who is out there—the differences of race and class, of ethnic background and life-style that make our society generally so leery of strangers.
It is clear that Lutheranism was slow to develop a mission theology—the concept is hardly known in the Confessions themselves. So a return to tradition is not immediately helpful here, even though many of the great Lutheran themes—the grace of God, the life of faith, the understanding of freedom, the theology of the cross—are especially promising in the United States, where so much of the outreach work must be to the formerly churched, those casualties of Christianity who were one church members but left, for whatever reason, and would not easily join again. There are rich resources in our tradition for the present moment, but they require massaging, fresh theological articulation. And in the current theological setting for the ELCA, most theological work goes either in the direction of a beleaguered, defensive confessionalism, or a wide-eyed openness to the various critical theologies and their critiques of the classic Christian story—including our particular Lutheran version.
But the theological problems, though significant, are not really central. Much harder is the new diversity of American society in which outreach beyond the current membership requires openness to diverse cultural and ethic traditions, to people of color and of language other than English, to diverse life-styles, to a great range of social class diversity with which centrist Lutherans have never been very comfortable. No wonder in such a context that some congregations prefer to die, to close, to spend down their savings until the building has to be sold, usually to a thriving congregation of some other Christian tradition who can work with the current community that surrounds the building!
It is widely stated that mission is the central question before us in the ELCA today, but we should not get ahead of ourselves and confuse that observation with the notion that local congregations have decided to be in mission, with a sober sense of what this will involve, and with the theology, the personnel, and the skills to have some hope of success. We are coming to see what we need, but have not necessarily made the hard decision. Some have, of course, and some never will. But most Lutherans are like swimmers on the bank of a very cold stream trying to decide whether or not we should take the plunge.
3. Sustaining this shift requires a new kind of theology, a set of new skills, and a new partnership between clergy and laity.
The church needs many things to make this transition, once the need itself has been clarified and affirmed. It needs fresh theological work as was described above. It needs a whole set of new skills, in studying communities, in contextualization, in welcoming strangers, in renewing worship, in communicating the faith. Perhaps most of all it needs a fresh alliance of clergy and lay leadership, or as I have argued elsewhere, a growing core of persons in each congregation who are articulate enough about their faith that they can make a public witness in the world.
This last shift toward shared leadership is the most important of all in my view. It is only a very small step forward, and even in some ways a step backward, to try to call pastors who will do the work of evangelization. That's partly right, but in the post-Christendom culture where we live, even the best trained and most enthusiastic clergy in the world will not be able to move congregations from comfortable tradition to risky mission.
Of course we will need pastors and a variety of other church workers for this new task, and much of the paper will be devoted to that need. But we ought to see at the outset that we need such leaders for a particular purpose—to be teachers and evangelists and preachers and coaches of this growing core of persons who move beyond nominal membership into more active commitment.
The major thrust of such commitment should be vocational—that is focused on Christian witness in daily life, rather than the training of people to help with church work. There is always a certain among of that to be done, but the impact of the Christian community in the future will depend very much on credible Christian lives lived out in the context of pluralism and indifference, and the conversation about Christian faith today will most often emerge among people who work together, live as neighbors, work together for the common good in local communities.
This lay vocational thrust has been the underdeveloped potential of the Reformation now for almost five centuries. It is always almost irresistible for the church to settle back into clericalism and then complain about it rather than envision the church's impact in a new way. But the end of Christendom is not only threat but opportunity to forge a different kind of Christian community, having something in common with the close-knit, high expectation house churches of the early centuries, but also quite different from then in being selectively world affirming. It is soon easy to see that equipping people to live as Christians with such goals will take very strong local church leadership, but of a different sort than what we have practiced as congregations devoted primarily to programs meeting the various needs and interests of our own members.
In this transition the theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer continues to be of special significance. He saw most clearly of the great twentieth century theologians the need for the church to make a double movement—more deeply into the faith (for protection against a cultural cooped Christianity) and more expansively into the world (for protection against creating a new Christian ghetto). Some of us are more drawn to Bonhoeffer's depth side and some to his more expansive, but a church in mission need to learn to sustain that complex rhythm.
4. The seminaries (and other educational institutions) are not automatically willing or able to help with this task, but can be mobilized to the effort by considering the needs of the church and listening to our own graduate.
It is my hope that the whole educational system of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America might now be pressed into service for this transformation task of setting us on the path of Christian outreach and witness to our contemporary society. We have intact a formidable system of seminaries and colleges, continuing education centers, teaching congregations, to say nothing of church wide and synodical structures, social service agencies, outdoor ministries and retreat centers.
These institutions are diverse, independent, vital, and not particular used to working together, even though there have been some longings for a more cooperative and interdependent system. It was the fully developed dream of clustering as access—that third and most exciting concept of clustering that seminaries might provide leadership in forging new partnerships with all the teaching resources in each of the three regions of the US who were willing to explore how we might develop a new delivery system. We are together this weekend at a fairly advanced stage of that exploration, not so much now thinking whether we will do this, but how.
But before plunging ahead we should pause to admit what everyone else can see about us—that we are not especially well prepared ourselves to lead this new missional thrust. If it is still a stretch to imagine many of our congregations vigorous in mission and witness, then we must confess quite candidly that we are not very different from them, turned in on ourselves in all kinds of ways that make us unlikely leaders of missional renewal in the church.
I say this to show you that I acknowledge the problem, but not at all to get us off the hook. The kind of transformation that we need will require a lot of assistance from an educational system, and since we are that educational system, we need to learn how to do what the church needs from us, even if it isn't a matter of "doing what comes naturally." And the truth is that we have made a beginning in learning how to listen to the churches, and even begun to consider and produce some of the new theology, cultural analysis, and skills training that are required. Looking around this room we would not want to boast that the Lutheran glass is full, but it is not empty either.
The task of listening to the church, of understanding its frustrations and aspirations today, is one that we will do far better together than we will do alone. This much at least has emerged from the decade of slowly accelerating joint work for Luther and PLTS. But the exercise generates resistance and denial along the way, and forces us to a constant recognition that this kind of support theology for church theology is humble, sometimes tedious labor for which one is not likely to receive laurels from the academy or other places that we have sometimes been looking for validation of what we do.
5. The shift to mission requires basic changes in theological education at every level: seminary, alternate preparation programs, continuing education, and parish education.
If we could agree that the missional issue is central for the future of our church, and that a major transformation effort is needed, then we could go to work at every level of the tasks represented here to ask how what we do would have to be different with that goal in mind. Much, of course, would remain the same, but even the centrality of the Bible, for example, has a quite different feel if the Word is being presented as a counter-cultural possibility of grace rather than the pinnacle of natural human wisdom.
Changes would be required in what we teach, who teaches, and in how we teach and we could not as professors simply make those changes alone as seemed best to us. Without abdicating responsibility for the integrity and churchly relevance of our own programs, we would have to invite into the conversation those persons in our church would already have been exploring these paths—growing congregations, urban coalitions, certain persons in our church structures would have important clues to contribute. In the process of such discussions, many of them would begin to join us in some aspect of the teaching.
We could learn a great deal about how this might work from looking at the various alternate route to ordained ministry programs that have developed over the last decade, in our church and in other churches. In our PUS program in Los Angeles, for example, we've worked with over 100 students who are selected initially because they are already contextual, already doing ministry, already showing signs of those missional and entrepreneurial skills that the church needs but seems not to know how to produce. These student have quite different levels of academic skills than those in our residential MDiv programs, so that faculty who teach in this program are at first disoriented. But after a time one begins to see how much these students bring with them, and one learns to adapt long established ways of teaching Bible or theology, liturgy or pastoral care to the exciting work of asking how the Lutheran version of Christianity might play with faithfulness and vitality in the setting where they continue to work (supervised by mentors) in their threeyear or four-year preparation programs.
I've been one who was initially disoriented teaching in this program, but who know that the stakes were far too high to give up. Eventually content and pedagogical flexibility kick in, and even old dogs learn some new tricks. We need a similar transformation of our residential programs training future pastors and church workers. And we need to keep asking what other kinds of leadership training are needed in addition to two year and four year residential programs.
I would be doing the work of this consultation to spell out in detail what no one person can really see, how our current offerings might be transformed by focus on what the church needs (and who the church needs) for mission. The seminary degree programs are central in this, but they cannot do the job alone. Continuing education might be optional for a priest in Christendom (or a Lutheran pastors in its Nordic precincts), but the whole history of missions tells us that you can't be programmed every for a missional life, where one needs continuing flexibility, continuing contextual analysis, ever new skills. So a great new partnership could be forged around this question that would bring us together not as people doing a parallel task that needs coordination, but as resources for a retooling and equipping of the church to enter a new phase of its history.
6. When we add the training of diverse leaders in degree and certificate programs to the training of pastors in seminaries, we have an expanded notion of the work of theological education.
When we add continuing education for all those leaders not as an option, but as a missional necessary, the task expands radically. And if we see the equipping of the saints at the local level as an integral part of that task, since they are the primary bearers of the message and the mission, then our common work explodes into a new agenda that is beyond any of our current capacities.
The diverse participants in this gathering make it clear that the seminaries cannot do it alone. Our forging some new alliance for education in support of renewed mission is an exciting concept and an emerging vision. But because we continue to be institutions with diverse purposes, we need to have a way to maintain this intentionality, this critical capacity to ask at every point: "And how would that serve our new mission?" This means me to the proposal that makes the most sense to me: Only a newly created Western Mission Cluster faculty can provide both the educational instruction and the reformation of content needed for the task.
In one way, of course, we already have a Western Mission Cluster faculty if we add to the personnel of the seminaries those in the various extension programs, institutions, centers, and churches here who currently provide such education. That would be a start, and it would make a very different brochure than that produced by the Eastern Cluster which simply put together the pictures of all the resources in the three seminaries, department by department. But I think we need a process that names those do and could offer such education (including some review of credentials, so that volunteers are screened by criteria of competence and shared vision), activities of team-building that bring parts of that group together from time to time, and an intentional faculty development plan, led by the two seminaries, but not limited to the question of how they will secure their residential faculties for the future.
In the short run I think the simple listing (with pictures and brief descriptions of background and skills) of this faculty would be an exciting event for our cluster, showing us (and even the larger church) what a range of resources we have to work with in the ELCA alone. In the middle run I think we could help each other sustain the missional vision by events that gathered us for faculty development around that new mandate. In the long run I think we could make better personnel use of the scattered but under-employed persons on our territory who could help, and we could encourage a new generation of persons to prepare for teaching ministries with a broader horizon than the question of what openings there might be in our seminaries and a few college religion departments. In fact the doctoral training that one would pursue might be quite different if one aspired to this work rather than leadership within the academy (of course these are not, I hope, mutually incompatible).
7. One final word: The startling event of PUS and LS working together, in close partnership with colleges, continuing education centers, teaching congregations and various structures and units of the church could be a kind of eschatological sign that would grab attention and sustain it.
I keep hearing amazement in my travels as people notice that clustering, whatever its origins, appears to be something more than doing or saying what the church requires for continuing support. It is surprising enough to see institutions as different in history and self-concept as PLTS and Luther working in ever closer partnership, but the surprise can be even greater if we can forge and act on the kind of partnership that is represented around the circle at this conference.
And we need some surprise to overcome the inertia within us and within our churches. Given the size and the diversity of the ELCA, it is almost impossible to move it in any direction, to rally it to any kind of cause. But the decentralization which is among the most fascinating features of clustering means that we have opportunity here in the West to move ahead without having to persuade the whole country that this missional direction is the one to take.
I believe that success in being the Western Mission Cluster in something more than name depends on four factors that must work together:
a). a theological vision of mission sustained by ongoing cultural analysis and fresh theological work.
b). an expansive partnership with an intentional personnel plan—something like the Western Mission Cluster Faculty discussed above.
c). a realistic partnership with a business plan that provides revenues that support this mission without threatening the other legitimate purposes of our institutions and
d). the political skills to sustain the vision in the face of complexity and resistance.
It is on the last point, especially, that we need full partnership with the synods, and the support and approval of the relevant churchwide units (you can see from the direction of my thinking what a mistake it is not to have someone here from the Division for Outreach of the ELCA), and of the mission-driven congregations who have already learned (and are teaching) key elements of what we now need. We cannot do this as educational institutions without them—synods, congregations, church-wide units, but I sense increasingly they see that they cannot sustain a new missional thrust without an effective partnership with us—a system for missional education for the whole leadership core.
There are many items on my institutional full plate, but when I step back and look at the churches, I know that this one has priority. I sense here a deep fit between the purposes for which PUS was created in the first place almost fifty years ago, our current attempts at renewal—especially in the Alternate Route program, and the whole current profile of curriculum and institutional development at Luther Seminary. I sense that our synods, at least for the most part, know that this missional question is central and that we are not geared up to meet it effectively, at least not yet.
David Tiede will provide a more detailed structural analysis of what we need and how to do it, in terms of an effective delivery system. I hope we'll do something ambitious along those lines. But my contribution then is perhaps a Lutheran altar call. When we look at the struggles of our congregations today, when we see the unmet missional opportunity, when we know how hard the task is whether we are crossing cultural boundaries or trying to re-evangelize the formerly churched, can we hold back from helping or see this as just one good among many. The details of future life of the church in the new millennium are far from clear to me; I expect to be surprised by the Holy Spirit in what happens in the years to come. But I do not think the missional needs are one of many factors; I propose they are the central reality before us determining whether our particular form of Christian faith and Christian life has a future at all.